


I Can’t Seem to Find One Where You Look Like I Remember

by FrenchTwistResistance



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 09:25:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18753580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: Hilda had known and not known Lilith. What does she make of the regular Mary Wardwell? And what does Mary make of her?





	I Can’t Seem to Find One Where You Look Like I Remember

So Mary Wardwell is Lilith, Adam’s first wife, first witch, mother of demons, queen of hell. Lilith is a lot of things. So what. Or. So what now?

What is her host body? An unassuming spinster schoolteacher with rock-hard calves? 

And can Hilda separate the two? Does she want to? Which would she prefer if she were to have the option?

It’s Thursday, and Thursdays are the worst.

That’s why Mary—or Lilith rather—and Hilda had agreed to meet on Thursdays in the first place. To have something to look forward to on an awful day.

But that Mary had not been Mary but Lilith.

Even so, even after, Hilda had found herself at Baxter High on a Thursday afternoon.

It had been ritual. It had been muscle memory. It had been her body reacting to previous stimuli. A phantom limb still itching and aching.

And as she had stood at Mary’s office door, she had realized she’d made an error. The woman behind the door would no longer be the woman she’d known, the non-woman she’d known, the non-woman she’d fucked and never really known. 

But she had stood and had knocked anyway.

It’s Thursday, and if it hadn’t been, perhaps there wouldn’t have been so much license. Thursdays are terrible anyway, so why not add a little more trash to the trash fire?

Mary calls from within, and it’s the real Mary.

“It’s unlocked,” a Mary, some Mary, says.

Hilda enters.

The office is familiar—all wood paneling and radiators, all desk and detritus. But the Mary sitting in the worn leather chair is different. She’s mousey and mediocre and very mortal. Very attractive still but frizzy and fuzzy and. Different. But not different enough. The rock-hard calves are hidden beneath the desk, but Hilda knows they’re still there. They’d been there long before Lilith had taken possession of them, after all.

Hell and a half, Hilda had been ogling Mary Wardwell’s legs for years, and here she is in her office, knowing full well what those legs were capable of wrapped around somebody’s torso, pressed on either side of a person’s face, straining to brace another body up against a wall. At least what they’d been capable of under the control of a very sexy demon who had first seduced her in this very office.

Here she is in the real Mary’s office, knowing full well this Mary has no idea of what Hilda knows of her body. And she feels dirty thinking about it and dirty about being here at all suddenly. She doesn’t know what she had expected from the encounter when she’d driven here on autopilot. Maybe she just needs to see for herself. Prove to herself that Lilith is really gone from this realm. Or maybe she just wants to ogle those legs again.

“Mrs. Spellman,” Mary says. Mary—this real Mary—swallows audibly. “To what do I owe the—” she swallows again. “—the pleasure?”

But the thing about real Mary is that she doesn’t know Hilda is always real Hilda and can read minds, often accidentally.

Hilda has been so caught up with her own internal monologue and moral dilemmas that she hasn’t bothered to tamp down the instinctual, autonomic part of her that does such a thing, and just as she’s considering a few different lies that might get her out of here quick, fast, and in a hurry, the projection screen of her brain floods with blurry images and half-formed ideas, stuttering words, some guilt, some confusion, and just a freight train of lust, barreling full-steam through all of it.

The force of the visions emanating from Mary’s oblivious and open brain almost knocks Hilda clean over. She grips the back of a wooden guest chair and can’t help but dig a little, investigate further, see if she can sort what’s happening in there to better equip herself for the conversation they will inevitably have because for all intents and purposes she’s a concerned parent in a principal’s office and some kind of conversation therefore must be had.

She probes gently, carefully parsing information, reverently stroking each thought like a historian discovering a deliberately long-hidden diary. 

She doesn’t pry unnecessarily. She could if she wanted, but she almost never wants that. She doesn’t want to know everyone’s deepest, darkest secrets, and she feels it’s unethical to go looking for them. But those immediate surface thoughts. Those are free game. Most people reveal most of them without telepathy one way or another anyhow.

And Mary’s immediate surface thoughts are of her. So that gives her even more freedom to read them, in her own theory of ethics.

Mary’s thinking about Hilda’s chest and mouth—the way they look and the way they might taste and how they might respond to different pressure from her lips.

Mary’s thinking about whether Hilda’s hair might feel soft or coarse against her fingertips.

Mary’s thinking she already somehow knows what Hilda might sound like as she sucks on her neck and is confused as to why she might know that.

Mary’s thinking. But Mary’s also imagining. But some of her imaginings have already happened when she wasn’t herself.

Hilda processes all this: 1. Mary Wardwell, the real actual one, the unassuming inconsequential original mortal, who had taken salsa dancing classes or whatever to obtain those rock-hard calves, had genuinely desired her. 2. Mary Wardwell, the (hot, taut) body Lilith had chosen as vessel, retains some tacit memory of what Lilith had gotten up to in her skin. 3. She’s glad her telepathic abilities suspend time a little so she’s able to process so thoroughly.

She processes and smiles.

She processes and feels better about what she’s doing here.

Hilda is unaccustomed to being a femme fatale. But as she contemplates the dynamics in play here—the somnambulant, sensual perceptions that the human Mary Wardwell is just barely detecting and the palpable memories she herself can readily access—she rather likes the feeling of being so sexy and in control. Hilda doesn’t bother with the lies she’d been shuffling through. She’s decided to commit to being the femme fatale that Mary Wardwell sees her as, somehow. She says,

“You owe the pleasure to only me.”

Mary’s eyelashes flutter. She says,

“Oh. Oh, well. Please, have a seat.”

“I prefer to stand,” Hilda says.

“Did you want to discuss—” Mary has taken off her glasses, is shuffling papers on her desk. She’s flustered, and it doesn’t take an empath to see it. But Hilda is an empath, can feel each of her anxious, flustered, increasingly giddy feelings even though she’s not trying to and is, in fact, now that she knows so much about her, trying not to.

“You know what I want to discuss,” Hilda says. She’s still very unaccustomed to being a femme fatale, but it’s rather fun to pretend. And it’s rather fun to keep this new Mary on edge. The old Mary—the Lilith Mary—had always kept her so on edge, not given her any relevant details to piece together. At least she’s giving clues, or so she hopes.

She feels at the edges of her brain projection screen an incoming wave of sexual desire regardless.

“But you’re married. And I’m engaged,” Mary says.

“What?” Hilda says, genuinely flabbergasted at the reproach.

They stare at each other a moment. 

“I love Adam, and you love Zelda.”

They stare at each other another moment.

She can’t just tell her here and now that Adam is dead. If she doesn’t know already, that’s a hard thing to approach at any angle. And she doesn’t want to touch the Zelda thing with a ten-foot pole.

Hilda says as her femme fatale persona,

“But neither of them are here right now. But we are.”

That’s all Mary had needed to hear, apparently.

Hilda might have felt more guilty at the prospect of being complicit in an adulterous affair. But as it stands, Mary’s adultery is nonexistent because her partner is dead, and Hilda’s adultery is nonexistent because her partner is imagined, implied. She doesn’t have the mental space currently to apply to that particular quandary right now.

Because Mary has rounded the desk and is propped upon it in front of Hilda. Mary releases her magnificent hair from the tie that has been encumbering it. And her grey skirt suit suddenly looks so much more enticing because of the hair that’s now loose and radiant.

“Engaged isn’t married,” Mary says.

“And I’m not actually married. You just assumed,” Hilda says.

Hilda feels Mary’s thoughts. Or rather one concentrated thought. Hilda shivers. She’d never have guessed that anyone but Lilith might think such a way.

“And you’re assuming something else as we speak,” Hilda continues.

Mary blinks. She’s very original Mary but there’s a shade there of Lilith Mary, just in a corner of an eyelid crinkle.

“I am,” Mary says. “I am. Assuming you will touch me.”

Mary has her eyes closed and is leaning back on the desk, propped this way on one taut, trembling arm.

Hilda has long ogled Mary’s triceps, too. 

Hilda has to remind herself that she’s the femme fatale in this scenario. That she’s the one who can read minds.

She has to remind herself: she’s here because it’s Thursday. She has to remind herself: Mary is not Lilith.


End file.
